On the 3d of December 1779 their Majesties' servants played, by command, at Drury Lane, the "Winter's Tale," for the sixth time. Gentleman Smith was Leontes; Bensley, Polixenes; Brereton, Florizel; Miss Farren, Hermione; and Mrs. Robinson, Perdita.
The King, Queen, and royal family were in their box, when Perdita entered the green-room, dressed more exquisitely and looking more bewitching than ever. "You will make a conquest of the Prince, to-night," said Smith laughingly; "I never saw you look so handsome as you do now!" He was a true prophet. The Prince was subdued by her beauty, and subsequently wrote letters to her, which were signed "Florizel," and were carried by no less noble a go-between than William Anne Capel, Earl of Essex; but others ascribe this messengership of love to his son Viscount Malden, who subsequently married Miss Stephens, the vocalist, and present dowager-countess.[29]
The messenger of love wooed her for the Prince, while he adored her himself,—at least he said so. He gave her the Prince's portrait, and a heart,—not in precious metal, but in paper,—a symbol of the worth and tenacity of the Prince's. On this token was a double motto, in French, for the air of the thing: "Je ne change qu'en mourant;" and in English, for the emphasis of it: "Unalterable to my Perdita through life."
This young creature's husband was living in profligacy on her salary, which he received at the treasury, and she was wooed by a young Prince, with a magic of wooing which, she said, she should never forget. The first step she made towards the latter was, by meeting him in a boat, moored off Kew. The second, was by meeting him by moonlight, in Kew Gardens. But then, the "Bishop of Osnaburgh" was present! And the lady herself was a furbelowed Egeria to a powdered Numa. "During many months of confidential correspondence," she says, "I always offered his royal highness the best advice in my power."
Deathless was to be the young Prince's love, and his munificence was to be equal to his truth. In proof of the latter, he gave her a bond for £20,000, to be paid to her on his coming of age. In a few months he attained his majority, refused to pay the money, and made no secret to the lady of his deathless love having altogether died out. He passed her in the park, affecting not to know her; and the spirited young woman, who had given up a lucrative profession for his sake, flung a remark at him, in her indignation, that ought to have made him blush, had he been to that manner born. However, she was not altogether abandoned. The patriotic Whig statesman, Charles Fox, obtained for the Prince's cast-off favourite an annuity of £300,—out of the pockets of a tax-paying people!
Perdita would fain have returned to the stage, but her friends dissuaded her. No one could tell how a moral people would receive the abandoned of "Florizel!" So, restless, she dwelt, now here, now there; now in France, where Marie Antoinette gave a purse, knitted by her luckless fingers, to "la belle Anglaise;" now in Brighton, where also resided, in the brightest of her beauty and the highest of her splendour, Mrs. Fitzherbert;—the married Polly and the royal Macheath's neglected Lucy?
Perdita was not idle; she wrote poems and novels; the former, tender in sentiment and expression; the latter, not without power and good sense. She had undertaken to supply the Morning Post with poetry, when she died, after cruel suffering, in the last year of the last century (1800); and she herself the last of the pupils of David Garrick.
There was good in this hapless creature. Throughout life she was the loving and helping child of her mother; the loving and helping mother of her child, for both of whom she laboured ungrudgingly to the last. Hannah More, herself, would not harshly construe the conduct of her pupil. "I make the greatest allowance for inexperience and novel passions," was the comment of Horace Walpole. "Poor Perdita!" said Mrs. Siddons, "I pity her from my very heart!"
She fell into bad hands—beginning with those of her father. In her husband's she was still less cared for, though she spent nearly a year with him in a sponging-house, to leave which she was importuned by worthless peers and equally worthless commoners—from ancient dukes down to young city merchants. There was a public admiration for her which scarcely any other actress so practically experienced. Thus, on the night in 1776, when the "Trip to Scarborough" was undergoing temporary but loud condemnation, Mrs. Yates, yielding to the storm, suddenly withdrew, and left Mrs. Robinson, as Amanda, standing alone on the stage, where she was so bewildered by the continued hissing, that the Duke of Cumberland stood up in his box, requested her not to be alarmed, and cheered her by calling out, "It is not you, but the piece, they are hissing."